The Qu’ran doesn’t label dogs as untouchable (in fact, there’s quite a nice vignette of the Prophet Muhammad setting a guard for a dog with a litter of puppies).

According to Mohammed Hanif, writing in The New York Times, “[m]ost of Muslims’ dog hate comes to us via the Hadith.” Which makes one wonder (yet again) about the veracity of the corpus of sayings of the Prophet as reported by his Companions…and repeated through the ages (sort of like a centuries-long game of ‘telephone’).

There’s a nuanced discussion of one of our favorite topics: Islamophobia, by Massimo Pigliucci on the website Scientia Salon.

One snippet: “While the statistics on international terrorism are complex and can be read in a number of ways, there is little doubt even in the mind of sympathetic commentators like CNN’s Fared Zakaria that contemporary Islam does have a problem with violence and oppression (especially of women and gays).”

And another: “simply pointing out that Islamic ideas play a role in contemporary terrorism and repression does not make one a Islamophobe, and using the label blindly is simply an undemocratic, and unreflective, way of cutting off critical discourse.”

“I don’t need to defend why I keep going back to my mosque, don’t need to name the spiritual highs and sense of connectedness I derive from this imperfect space, this imperfect community. This imperfect community that struggles with homophobia, but also with anti-blackness and misogyny, that is simultaneously battling surveillance and racial profiling, wars in the name of saving us from ourselves, motherlands being pounded by drones.”

Yet another gunman with an Arabic name has opened fire in an American city.

This time the gunman was born in Kuwait and the city was Chattanooga, Tennessee. Those killed: four United States Marines.

According to the New York Times: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation identified the gunman, who also died Thursday, as Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, who became a naturalized United States citizen and went to high school and college in Chattanooga.”